'I'm 30, stop asking me when I'm going to have kids'

The first comment came just before my 30th birthday. At a routine GP check-up, my doctor stopped typing my medical notes, looked me in the eye and said: “When are you going to have children?”

My stunned face probably said it all. “You have a boyfriend, yes?”, she continued. I nodded. “Well, you’ve got until you’re 31 and then I’ll be on your case. Don’t be one of those women I always see who leaves it too late.”

Now, I’m two months off my 31st birthday, single, 10,000 miles from home and even further from having children than I was then. And she’s become part of a seemingly never ending army of people who want to know why I’m not settling down and stockpiling ovulation kits.

There’s my school friends who all shacked up years ago, Facebook friends who tell me that I’m “losing the baby race”, the colleague who told me not to waste time like she did and even my father who asks me repeatedly when I’m going to meet ‘the one’.

And maybe they have a point. My biological clock is ticking, but – you know what – I’m alright with that. I’m alright with waiting to see whether I meet the right person and it works out, rather than rushing in to a shotgun relationship just to be socially accepted and then being miserable.

I’m also alright with not juggling my career and a child (props to those who do, especially my best friends), being able to do what the hell I like (including moving to Australia on a whim) and sleeping a full eight hours every night after three generously-poured glasses of wine. In fact - dare I say it – I’m actually kind of cool with never having kids, period.

And you know what the strange thing is? Not a single one of my male friends is having these conversations. They’re happily going about their business without even the slightest aside about their reproductive organs.